Johann: We are talking with Stephen Lawhead, author of the new book Scarlet, his second book in his trilogy re-exploring the legend of Robin Hood. Stephen Lawhead, sir, thank you so much taking the time to join me here on the M88 morning show.
Stephen Lawhead: It’s a pleasure.
J: First of all I wanted to talk a little about magic. Because your books often incorporate some Druidic elements, “magic,” and with the final Harry Potter book coming out earlier this year, once again the whole issue of magic in Christian stories has been a “hot button” topic for many Christian readers. So let me ask you, what is your view so far as magic being used in stories, and especially stories that have any sort of relation back to Christianity?
SL: Okay, let’s start out by saying that I want to, first of all, distance myself from this debate somewhat in that the implication is that my books are full of magic and they are not.
J: Sure.
SL: Sometimes there are a few characters in my books who do things that are not quite explainable by the natural physical laws, but I don’t classify that as magic per se. For example, I go back to earliest sources, in fact even early Christian writings, and find these examples of these what-you-might-call miracles or supernatural occurrences which many of the earlier sources attributed to God or the work of angels or something but not magic. I’m thinking in terms of the Druids and early Celtic Christians who had things like, for example, a cane. A cane is similar to a charm. It would be words that you would say to protect your house or to protect yourself or your boat if you were at sea and this was invoking God’s protection for your journey or for yourself or your cattle, whatever. But they didn’t consider that magic; that was something else. They considered it something else.
Now having said that, let me say this, stepping completely back from the debate in saying that. In literature, magic is an analog. No one is actually trying to teach magic. In Harry Potter there is a use of magic but is not an advocate for use of magic per se. What it’s talking about is that magic is an analog for power. In Harry Potter and other books like this the metaphor is that the character, a young person who is adrift in an adult world, is lacking powerful magic that gives him something he lacks, which is the power to survive, to persevere, to make his way through in an adult world. And that’s how magic functions as a metaphor in literature. Therefore any debate about reading Harry Potter because there’s magic in it I think is really misplaced.
J: I think I phrased my question poorly. I wasn’t trying to imply that your books are full of magic. I always find it interesting how you have these things that are kind of inexplicable, and I love how you always having a spiritual aspect as to what the characters are doing. And for instance, in your Pendragon cycle, because these characters did these things that were related to the spiritual world, people spun these stories about Merlyn being a great magician because they didn’t understand his connection with God and how these things were happening.
Also the connection with the Druidic element is very interesting just because I’ve heard a lot with the Harry Potter thing that the Druid stuff is always very bad and you don’t want to have anything to do with that. For instance, in Scarlet your character who kind of goes through her cave and kind of wades through the ripples of time and seems to have some Druid connections. I was just curious how you felt about that debate by Christians that seems anything that has something to do with magic they are offended by unless its in The Chronicles of Narnia.
SL: You see, here again, that’s a classic case of the divide, or how misplaced the argument is. C.S. Lewis, you might say who is above reproach, is able to use magic; then maybe I should just say, as a writer, well, whatever kind of magic he is using maybe that’s what I should use too because it will be okay. How to get around that divide? If it’s okay for him then maybe is will be okay for other people too.
Put it this way. Lets just cast back a little bit. The idea that the Druids are all bad, that is a fairly recent idea probably from the Victorian times on, when much of what they did was misrepresented and then later picked up by the new-agers who linked it to all kinds of pagan practices and rituals and all kinds of stuff, which was completely misplaced and misunderstood, misrepresented, and basically out of ignorance. Nobody knew much about the Druids. A lot of reasons were that they didn’t want to know a lot about them. They were happy to have them as sort of as a big mysterious unknown that they could attach a lot of occult belief to and then claim some sort of authenticity through that.
But, because the actual historical fact is that many of the Druids at a very, very early age became Christians and gave rise to the whole Celtic church; and that connection is very well established in history. It is not well known, but it’s fairly easily established if anyone wants to look into it fairly deeply as I have: not all that deeply but deep enough to understand that that connection is very, very strong. Therefore to non-Christians that are offended by that, it has also been willfully downplayed because they might rather have that sort of new age understanding. But that is pretty recent. For my books, I’m not trying to say anything about what I believe the people of the end of the tent century ought to have believed. I just represent what they believed; I don’t try to make a judgment on it. Well, were they right to believe that, or were they wrong to believe this about the Druids? I represent what they believed. They did believe in the very very close presence of the spirit world and people’s ability to access that. Now, were they right to believe that? Were they wrong to believe it, perhaps? But it is not up to me to decide as a revisionist what should have been, I’m just representing what actually was. The fact is, at the time they did believe in these connections of the Druids, they did believe supernatural events could take place and people could influence them in certain ways, and so in my books, as to make them authentic to the history, I show them acting on those beliefs.
J: I just thought it was interesting when I was reading through Scarlet during the song that (I can never pronounce her name, it starts with an “A”) the Druidic woman, during one of her songs she has Jesu and Druid in the same sentence. Not that I had a problem with that, but I was thinking, wow, that’s kind of bold because I know a lot of Christians who would freak out because that is in the same sentence. I thought it was a beautiful song though.
SL: I know someone who has a great deal of respect for St. Patrick or St. Columba who has had a great impact in
J: Right, well thinking of taking old legends, one of my favorite parts in Scarlet was when you get to the archery tournament. Because the archery tournament is one of those parts of the Robin Hood legend that everyone “knows” about. And the way that you did the archery tournament when I got to the end of that particular part of the book I was thinking that was a great retelling of it because here’s an event that took place. If you took the seed of that event you could see that over the years it could respond to this larger legend that people would be familiar with. And yet maybe it was kind of a smaller deal. It’s just that over the years it expanded into this huge legend. I don’t know if that was your intent but when I was reading that, I really loved your “take” on the whole archery tournament and I just loved your retake on that particular part of the legend.
SL: Well, thanks. In fact I’m trying to do the same thing with that particular episode as with other episodes. To replay some of those what you might call the set pieces of the various legends, the archery tournament, or the fact that Robin Hood is often seen in some sort of disguise, and that’s a big feature of the legends too, is his ability with disguise. But to take those incidents and episodes and replay them in a way that is appropriate to the political reality of the time and part of that political reality is: Who would be around? What would be the circumstances of this thing that would take place? And to re-imagine it in the time and place given the characters that would make sense to the story. So we have an archery tournament, yes, but it’s quite different than what the typical Robin Hood Disney movie would portray. You know it is in fact not a golden arrow as the prize in mind but it’s a man’s life and that makes a little more sense to the political reality of the time and the circumstances in the book. But I’m glad you saw that because I think that for readers part of the delight is to recognize features of old legends, but in a new light; and it makes it possible to see it in a little different, maybe a fresher, way of looking at it.
J: This has always been one of my favorite parts of your writings with the Arthur legend and even going through Patrick a little bit; if you’re familiar with the actual legends themselves you can pick up on these seeds of maybe where these legends came from as you give your take on them. For me that is just a great discovery as a reader to come across that and see that in a totally different light and say, “Wow! maybe that’s where that legend got started,” and love being able to look at it from a different point of view.
Now, maybe I’m stretching a little bit and I don’t write like you do, but in the little short stories that I write I always get nervous when people try to tell you what they think you meant; so please don’t think I’m trying to do that: I’m certainly not. I thought it was kind of interesting in Scarlet as I was going through it that the power-hungry bad guys are the religious establishment, with the abbots and even some of the other characters who attend church and go through some of the rituals and what not, while the outlaws and thieves, Robin Hood and his band, are the guys who really have a relationship with the almighty God; and in my mind as I was reading it seemed kind of like maybe a slight parallel to Jesus in his day. Jesus had his band or group going around and taking a stand against the Pharisees in his religious establishment, and I don’t know if that’s what you intended, but where did you come up with the idea of having the religious establishment be the bad guys and then the people who usually might seem to be the bad guys, the thieves and the outlaws, are the ones who have this relationship with Christ and understand the reality of the spirit realm?
SL: That is an interesting thing to bring up. It wasn’t my intent to try to paint that in a certain way or to bend, to make that point. What I was really doing is just responding again. It is the basic history; and the fact is that when the Normans came with their church, they were some of the most religious people of their day, and to the extent that within 50 to 100 years they had repopulated all of England with churches far and wide built in stone that is made to last. In fact my little village here which is just outside
J: And also my understanding is, and correct me if I’m wrong, but during that time when you’re telling the stories one of the ways to gain power if you weren’t of nobility was to join the church because there was opportunity for advancement and riches and all those things that you might not be able to obtain otherwise; but you could do it through the church.
SL: You could do it through the church to such an extent that you have very few examples of people succeeding outside of the church; it was almost unheard of. The churches and the popes and everyone could grant and confer great wealth and great power and could also withhold it. And it really wasn’t an option for anyone who was both smart and ambitious to be outside of that.
J: Now one of the only major critiques and criticisms that I’ve heard about Scarlet so far is the fact that we now have to wait until 2009 for the next book to come out.
SL: I don’t know about that. Yeah, that’s unfortunate, it will be late. I’m going to plead personal crisis for myself. Last year for about 6 to 8 months I was very, very ill and all work ceased. I’m back to work in
J: Well, we can certainly indulge you in that. I was curious, though: have you ever considered writing like an entire trilogy all in one big group and then just kind of releasing the books rapidly one right after the other? Like they do with some movie trilogies now, where they film the whole thing and they just release the movies in consecutive years.
SL: Well, that would work; you’d need time to write them, though. So in other words you wouldn’t have a book next year; you’d have to wait the next three years, but then you’d get the next three books published within nine months of each other or something like that. I understand your questions, where you’re coming from. Publishing realities today are that publishers need more and more time to seek out all the places that they can sell those books in order to make it work financially or to even publish them. And some of the places, like book review magazines or the big Wal-Marts, they won’t even look at a book if it is within six months of release. They won’t have time to put it in their catalogs. They won’t have time to order it into all their chain stores because all the other products that are coming out are very tightly scheduled so in order to slot it in they need 6 months to work the schedule. It’s not actually the printing of the book, the actual production of making the book covers, that all goes along while I’m writing. It really is for the sales reps to get around and make the calls to the places that need to feature the book, and it takes a lot of time and they certainly don’t want to miss out on those opportunities because making books gets more and more expensive and they need more and more places to sell them in order to survive.
J: I had the suspicion that might be the case. Now, last time we talked we discussed, briefly, movie options. Has anything changed along those lines so far as a studio’s optioning some of your books to making the movies?
SL: We had a great flurry of interest over Hood and I expect that to renew now that Scarlet is out. But so far no one has signed it up to take it on, so, if Steven Spielberg is listening he can get in touch with us. I think it is going to take something like Steven Spielberg or someone with very deep pockets to make a movie like this. Because when it’s time to do things with computers it’s still pretty expensive, costume dramas. This would be pretty expensive to do.
J: Well, you write in such a cinematic style anyway, it is very easy for me as I read to imagine visually all that should be set and what it would look like. I gets me excited about movie possibilities. I’ve taken up too much of your time; I apologize, I love talking to you. Real quick, do you have any plans beyond the end of this particular King Raven trilogy? Are you thinking that far ahead or are you just focused on Tuck right now?
SL: I really am focused on Tuck, but I should say that not a day goes by that I don’t think about what’s next and I’ve got two or three possibilities, and it’s going to be coming down to choosing one. That is going to be very difficult because any of the two or three can get my juices flowing as a writer. But I’m just going to wait and see how the readership response to The King Raven is before I go on. Another historical or another fantasy? Yeah, I have some irons in the fire.
J: Any thoughts of returning to science fiction like you did early on?
SL: Well, I love science fiction. I really do. The problem is you can’t sell it. The writer can’t sell it to the publishers and the publishers can’t sell it to the people. I think probably because in this day and age
J: Well, Stephen Lawhead, author of the new book Scarlet, thank you so much for your time. It really was a pleasure for me to get a chance to chat with you. Thank you so much.
SL: Well, thank you very much. I look forward to speaking to you again soon.
